Representing
adverse events

Reports of adverse events that occur during clinical trials help identify issues with treatment safety and efficacy, and allow for better education of health practitioners and the general public, ultimately allowing us to learn from our mistakes to increase patient safety. In order to enable more effective sharing of such reports, this workshop will address the question of what the ontological basis for adverse events is.

This one-day workshop is divided into two parts. The first half will be presentations of accepted papers. The second half will be discussions centered around the construction of an adverse event representation within the OBO Foundry framework, motivated by the use case of vaccination clinical trials.

We will start with a proposal prototype for how the representation could be based on the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) and the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO), and, together, aim to establish building blocks for reuse and expansion by the larger biomedical ontologies community. It is expected that discussion of adverse events will force more general issues to be addressed, such as relations between signs, symptoms and diseases or how to encode diagnoses and hypotheses. Conclusions of such discussions will be incorporated into the OGMS and the IAO.

For more information on the Adverse Events Representation workshop please contact ae.icbo2011@gmail.com